Is Your Insurance Actually Covering You? A Yearly Review Checklist

Insurance is one of the few purchases where you find out what you bought at the worst possible moment. The most common problem is not the absence of a policy — it is a policy whose sums insured were set years ago and never revisited.

Business insurance

• Public and products liability: confirm the limit still meets the requirements in your current contracts. Many principals now require twenty million dollars.
• Business interruption: check the indemnity period. Twelve months rarely covers a rebuild plus a return to trading levels.
• Contents and plant: value at replacement cost today, not at what you paid.
• Cyber: increasingly a condition of doing business, not an optional extra.

Property insurance

Construction costs have risen sharply. A building insured for its 2019 rebuild figure may be materially underinsured, and average clauses can reduce a partial claim proportionally. For investment properties, confirm you hold landlord cover including loss of rent and malicious damage by tenants, not just a standard building policy.

Personal cover

• Life and total permanent disability: compare cover against total debt plus dependants living costs.
• Income protection: check the benefit period and waiting period, and whether it is agreed value or indemnity.
• Inside super versus held personally: both have valid roles; premium funding and tax treatment differ.

Read the exclusions once a year

Flood, actions of the sea, wear and tear, and unoccupied-property clauses cause more claim disputes than premium levels ever do. Ten minutes with the product disclosure statement is cheaper than a declined claim.

Do not buy on premium alone

The cheapest premium usually reflects a narrower policy wording, a higher excess or a lower sub-limit. Compare wording and limits first, then price.

Our insurance team can review your existing policies side by side and identify the gaps before you need to rely on them.